Like millions of other Americans, I was appalled by the news of a gang rape at a Cornell University fraternity house. But I’m glad the victim came forward and sued the university along with the seven men who allegedly assaulted her in 2024. And I’m grateful to the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun, for its intrepid reporting of the story.
But I still don’t think it should have named the seven accused men. And if you think otherwise, I’ve got one name for you: Matthew Ingalls.
A Cornell student by that name was one of the seven men whom the Sun identified. And a very different Matthew Ingalls has had to pay the price for that.
I’m talking about 23-year-old Marine Corps Sgt. Matthew Ingalls, a New York native with no connection to Cornell. But after the Sun’s report, his mother said, he started to receive “crazy aggressive messages.” So did Ingalls’ sister, who likewise had no link to Cornell.
The attacks stepped up when lawyers for the Cornell victim mistakenly served him with her lawsuit on Sept. 26. The attorneys admitted their error and amended the suit to reflect the correct person’s address. But the flawed filing was still publicly available.
And that meant it was open season on Sgt. Ingalls and his family. People posted their home address and phone numbers. They threw trash onto the family’s property. They sent death threats.
That should scare anyone who cares about due process and justice in the United States. By releasing the names of the accused men, the Sun encouraged people to take the law into their own hands.
I understand the impulse to do that, and I’ve been tempted to do the same. The reported behavior of these men was truly heinous. They treated the victim like a piece of trash. Why shouldn’t we throw trash — literal and verbal — at them?
Because in America, you’re still innocent until proven otherwise. You can’t call for a more transparent and thorough investigation — as the Sun did in its editorial naming the assailants — and then presume they’re guilty. Why ask any new questions, when we already know the answers?
Quoting Cornell president Michael Kotlikoff’s 2024 letter to the university community, the Sun noted that “‘only those who perpetuate sexual violence benefit from its concealment.’” But Kotlikoff made that comment in an appeal asking students who had experienced sexual assault to report it. In the Sun’s editorial, by contrast, it meant that only the seven accused men would benefit from keeping their names out of the papers.
But that’s not true. Sgt. Matthew Ingalls would have benefited, too, if the names hadn’t been published. Ditto for a small consulting firm in Texas, which was flooded with invective after internet vigilantes wrongly identified it as a company that another accused Cornell assailant owned.
Again, I have only the deepest respect for the dogged reporting by the Cornell Daily Sun. One of their writers spent 23 months on the story, even while she was studying abroad in Australia. Without her efforts, we might not be talking about this case at all.
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But identifying the accused men by name actually detracted from the Sun’s own case against Cornell: its flawed Title IX investigation, its failure to keep the victim informed, its toothless task force on sexual assault, and more.
Indeed, if I were the university, I would be glad the Sun named the accused assailants. That keeps the focus on them instead of on the culture of Cornell and what the institution has done — or not done — about the wider problem of campus sexual assault.
Forty years ago, when I was the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper at Columbia, we reported that a female student had been sexually abused at a fraternity. She said she had been “held prisoner” for two hours at a late-night “naked man’s meeting,” as her assailants called it. Some of them masturbated in front of her, she said.
We interviewed a fraternity member who insisted that all of this was in good fun. After the incident, he claimed, the victim “was laughing and joking with the guys.” We then ran an editorial, denouncing the idea that she had consented to the abuse.
“A woman who shows up at a fraternity at 2:30 in the morning is not ‘asking’ for such treatment, as some warped commentators on campus have alleged,” we wrote. “Their perverted argument reduces to the same nauseating rationale invoked for hundreds of years by men who have sexually abused women: ‘She wanted it.’”
But we refrained from publishing the names of the fraternity members she charged, even though we knew several of them. We didn’t want to indict anyone who might have been innocent, which could have triggered a different kind of abuse. Just ask Sgt. Ingalls about that.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. His next book, “Schooling Citizens: How Education Can Save Our Democracy,” will be published in the spring by the American Philosophical Society Press.